155,000 people buy the Daily Express these days, almost all of whom are surely are elderly and retired. Yet today, it launches an extraordinary attack on those very same readers, as prime minister and all round snake oil salesman Rishi Sunak vows to “slash the ballooning benefits bill” in order to reduce taxes. I hope the few remaining Express readers realise that Sunak means slashing their benefits?
Like it or not, the state pension is a benefit. I know many of us elderly folk like to pretend that the Retirement Pension isn’t a benefit because, well who wants to be branded a benefit claimant, particularly if you read the Express? But facts are facts and anyway, so what? However, what the Express fails to point out is that a vast proportion of the “ballooning benefits bill” goes to fund pensions, including pension credits for those who can’t get by on £10,600 a year. So when readers are dunking their Rich Tea biscuits into their breakfast tea and shouting “hear, hear” with the news that Sunak wants to slash benefits, they might wish to consider the simple fact that Sunak doesn’t mean the sick and disabled, he means them, too.
The government wants us to work until we drop. And with there being more jobs than people in Britain, he wants older folk to get back to work. Only last year, Chancer of the Exchequer Jeremy C … Hunt said we needed to get the over 50s “off the golf course and back to work”, given the large numbers of people who are retiring long before their state pension becomes due. I retired from full time work nine years before my state pension was due and I can honestly say that I have never, once, regretted it, or cursed having a slightly lower income. At a time when life expectancy is stalling and even falling in some places, why on earth would you take a punt that you might enjoy a long and healthy retirement if you could begin it that much earlier?
That old “workshy” headline is the usual desperate act of a government in decline and decay. The idea that there is a vast army of scroungers milking the system is as nonsensical as it ever was. These days, it’s merely part of Sunak’s politics of division, setting so-called strivers against skivers. A quick look below the surface reveals that the skivers he talks about are actually the sick, the disabled and the old, sometimes all three at the same time. Yes, we all know someone who we think is milking the system, but in truth there is no vast army of fraudsters, other than the friends of Sunak who are doing their level best to pay as little tax as possible, people like Rishi Sunak’s wife, for example.
Millions of people, especially women, have already been royally shafted by this Conservative government, losing as many as six or seven years of their state pension by raising the pension age dramatically. This is the next step. And it must be resisted.
If I had my time again, I’d have retired even earlier, knowing as I now do the slow but inevitable physical decline that comes with getting older. Assuming you will still be able to do at, say, a retirement age of 67 what you did at 60 requires an enormous leap of faith and frankly a fair amount of delusion as you begin to ache in places you didn’t know were places.
In short, the government and its client ‘journalists’ don’t want you to realise that the people they regard as “workshy” could well be you. When it comes to Sunak and the Express, don’t believe a word.
